Chemo slammed the door from the outside, plunging the house into darkness once more.
Stranahan heard the man running on the outside deck, following the apron around the house. Stranahan took aim through the walls. He imagined that the man was a rising quail, and he led accordingly. The first blast tore a softball-sized hole in the wall of the living room. The second punched out the shutter in the kitchen. The third and final shot was followed by a grunt and a splash outside.
“Christina!” Stranahan shouted. “Quick, help me up.”
But when she got there, biting back tears, crawling on bare knees, he had already passed out.
Chemo landed on his back in the water. He kicked his legs just to make sure he wasn’t paralyzed; other than a few splinters in his scalp, he seemed to be fine. He figured that the birdshot must have missed him, that the concussion so close to his head was what threw him off balance.
Instinctively he held the Ingram high out of the water with his right hand, and paddled furiously with his left. He knew he had to make it under cover of the house before Stranahan came out; otherwise he’d be a sitting duck. Chemo saw that the machine gun was dripping, so he figured it must have gotten dunked in the fall. Would it still fire? And how many rounds were left? He had lost count.
These were his concerns as he made for the pilings beneath the stilt house. Progress was maddeningly slow; by paddling with only one hand, Chemo tended to move himself in a frothy circle. In frustration he paddled more frenetically, a tactic that decreased the perimeter of his route but brought him no closer to safety. He expected at any second to see Stranahan burst onto the deck with the shotgun.
Beneath Chemo there appeared in the water a long gray-blue shadow, which hung there as if frozen in glass. It was Stranahan’s silent companion, Liza, awakened from its afternoon siesta by the wild commotion.
A barracuda this age is a creature of sublime instinct and flawless precision, an eating machine more calculating and efficient than any shark in the ocean. Over time the great barracuda had come to associate human activity with feeding; its impulses had been tuned by Stranahan’s evening pinfish ritual. As Chemo struggled in the shadows, the barracuda was on full alert, its cold eyes trained upward in anticipation. The blue-veined legs that kicked impotently at its head, the spastic thrashing-these posed no threat.
Something else had caught its attention: the familiar rhythmic glint of stunned prey on the water’s surface. The barracuda struck with primitive abandon, streaking up from the deep, slashing, then boring back toward the pilings.
There, beneath the house, the great fish flared its crimson gills in a darkening sulk. What it had mistaken for an easy meal of silver pinfish turned out to be no such thing, and the barracuda spit ignominiously through its fangs.
It was a testimony to sturdy Swiss craftsmanship that the Heuer diving watch was still ticking when it came to rest on the bottom. Its stainless silver and gold links glistened against Chemo’s pale severed hand, which reached up from the turtle grass like some lost piece of mannequin.
14
On Washington Avenue there was a small shop that sold artificial limbs. Dr. Rudy Graveline went there on his lunch hour and purchased four different models of prosthetic hands. He paid cash and made sure to get a receipt.
Later, back at Whispering Palms, he arranged the artificial hands in an attractive row on the top of his onyx desk.
“What about this one?” he asked Chemo.
“It’s a beaut,” Chemo said trenchantly, “except I’ve already got one on that arm.”
“Sorry.” Rudy Graveline picked up another. “Then look here-state-of-the-art technology. Four weeks of therapy, you can deal blackjack with this baby.”
“Wrong color,” Chemo remarked.
Rudy glanced at the artificial hand and thought: Of course it’s the wrong color, they’re all the wrong damn color. “It’s a tough match,” the doctor said.”I looked for the palest one they had.”
“I hate them all,” Chemo said. “Why does it have to be a hand, anyway?”
“You didn’t like the mechanical hooks,” Rudy Graveline reminded him. “Talk about advanced, you could load a gun, even type with those things. But you said no.”
“Damn right I said no.”
Rudy put down the prosthesis and said: “I wish you wouldn’t take that tone with me. I’m doing the best I can.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Look, didn’t I advise you to see a specialist?”
“And didn’t I advise you, you’re crazy? The cops’ll be hunting all over.”
“All right,” Rudy said in a calming voice. “Let’s not argue.”
It had been three weeks since Chemo had shown up behind Whispering Palms on a blood-streaked water scooter-a vision that Dr. Rudy Graveline would carry with him for the rest of his life. It had happened during an afternoon consult with Mrs. Carla Crumworthy, heiress to the Crumworthy panty-shield fortune. She had come to complain about the collagen injections that Rudy Graveline had administered to give her full, sensual lips, which is just what every rheumatoid seventy-one-year-old woman needs. Mrs. Crumworthy had lamented that the results were nothing like she had hoped, that she now resembled one of those Ubangi tribal women from the National Geographic, the ones with the ceramic platters in their mouths. And, in truth, Dr. Rudy Graveline was concerned about what had happened because Mrs. Crumworthy’s lips had indeed grown bulbous and unwieldy and hard as cobblestones. As he examined her (keeping his doubts to himself), Rudy wondered if maybe he had injected too much collagen, or not enough, or if maybe he’d zapped it into the wrong spots. Whatever the cause, the result was undeniable: Mrs. Carla Crumworthy looked like a duck wearing mauve lipstick. A malpractice jury could have a ball with this one.
Dr. Graveline had been whisking through his trusty Rolodex, searching for a kind-hearted colleague, when Mrs. Crumworthy suddenly rose to her feet and shrieked. Pointing out the picture window toward Biscayne Bay, the old woman had blubbered in terror, her huge misshapen lips slapping together in wet percussion. Rudy had no idea what she was trying to say.
He spun around and looked out the window.
The yellow jet ski lay on its side, adrift in the bay. Somehow Chemo had dragged himself, soaking wet and stark naked, over the ledge of the seawall behind the clinic. He didn’t look well enough to be dead. His gray shoulders shivered violently in the sunshine, and his eyes flickered vaguely through puffy purple slits. Chemo swung the bloody stump to show Dr. Graveline what had happened to his left hand. He pointed gamely at the elastic wrist tourniquet that he had fashioned from his Jockey shorts, and Rudy would later concede that it had probably saved his life.
Mrs. Carla Crumworthy was quickly ushered to a private recovery suite and oversedated, while Rudy and two young assistant surgeons led Chemo to an operating room. The assistants argued that he belonged at a real trauma center in a real hospital, but Chemo adamantly refused. This left the doctors with no choice but to operate or let him bleed to death.
Gently discouraged from participating in the surgery, Rudy had been content to let the young fellows work unimpeded. He spent the time making idle conversation with the woozy Chemo, who had rejected a general anesthetic in favor of an old-fashioned intravenous jolt of Demerol.
Since that evening, Chemo’s post-op recovery had progressed swiftly and in relative luxury, with the entire staff of Whispering Palms instructed to accommodate his every wish. Rudy Graveline himself was exceedingly attentive, as he needed Chemo’s loyalty now more than ever. He had hoped that the killer’s spirits would improve at the prospect of reconstructing his abbreviated leftarm.
“A new hand,” Rudy said, “would be a major step back to a normal life.”
“I never had a normal life,” Chemo pointed out. Sure, he would miss the hand, but he was more pissed off about losing the expensive wristwatch.